by Alex Kershaw
Eichmann had his hand in a pocket.
“Maybe he’s got a gun!” hissed one of the agents, who was sitting nearby in a black sedan.
Eichmann came closer and closer. As he passed the black sedan, one of the agents walked up to him and blocked his path.
“Momentito, Señor!”
Eichmann instantly realized something was up and tried to make a run for it. The agent jumped on him, and the two of them rolled in the gutter. Eichmann shouted for help and “howled and screamed.”
When the agent tried to pull Eichmann to his feet, “he let out a piercing scream . . . the primal cry of a cornered animal.”10
So that no one would hear Eichmann, an agent revved up the car’s engine. Eichmann was then pushed into the car, where he immediately went quiet and stopped struggling. He was breathing heavily. He didn’t say a word but was clearly very angry.
Aharoni drove off.
“Keep quiet and nothing will happen to you,” he told Eichmann in German. “If you struggle, you’ll be shot!”
There was no reaction.
“Can you hear me?” yelled Aharoni. “What language do you speak? Que lengua habla?”
Still no reply.
Aharoni thought Eichmann was unconscious. Perhaps he’d killed himself with poison. But then, after they had driven a few hundred yards, Eichmann suddenly said something. He was calm, and it sounded almost as if he were talking to himself.
“I am already resigned to my fate.”
Aharoni made sure he was not being tailed. Later that evening, having crossed Buenos Aires, he arrived in front of a Mossad safe house. Eichmann was hustled into the house and then into a small room.
“Sit down!”
Eichmann did so.
“Undress!”
Eichmann took off his coat, tie, and shirt.
“Lift your left arm.”
Eichmann did so slowly. There was a telltale scar in his left armpit. Unlike other SS fugitives, Eichmann had removed his blood type SS tattoo himself in a German POW camp, not through surgery.
One of his captors pulled out a cap worn by SS officers and put it on Eichmann’s head. Another agent looked at a picture and passed it to the other agents. They nodded. Then yet another Israeli agent entered, carrying X-ray plates. He was a doctor and carefully examined Eichmann’s collarbone and skull, both of which were once fractured. Eichmann was asked to write a few words. His handwriting was then examined.
“You are Karl Adolf Eichmann.”
“Are you Americans?” asked Eichmann.
“You are Karl Adolf Eichmann.”
“You must be Israelis.” Fear showed in Eichmann’s eyes. “The others are not interested in me,” said Eichmann. “Ich habe die ganze Zeit gezittert dass es so kommen wird. [I have always feared this is how it would happen.]”
The agents then placed Eichmann on an iron bed, with one leg shackled to the bed frame. When an agent began peering and prodding around in his mouth, Eichmann said that after so many years they needn’t expect him to still be on the alert and to have poison hidden in his teeth. In spite of his protest, his false teeth were removed and a thorough search made of his clothes and shoes.
“If you cooperate and don’t try anything foolish,” one of the agents told Eichmann, “you will be given a fair trial and the benefit of legal counsel.”
“All right,” Eichmann said. “I will cooperate.”11 He was now trembling with fear.
“You can quite easily understand,” said Eichmann, “that I am agitated at the moment. I would like to ask for a little wine, red wine if it’s possible, to help me control my emotions.”
One of the agents agreed to Eichmann’s request.
“As soon as you told me to keep quiet, there in the car, I knew I was in the hands of Israelis,” said Eichmann. “I know Hebrew: I learned it from Rabbi Leo Baeck: ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth . . . Shma Yisrael . . .’”
Eichmann’s captors were stunned by Eichmann’s use of their holy language. According to Mossad Chief Isser Harel: “The obsequious tone he used addressing his captors was enough in itself to disgust them, but when he pronounced the sacred words that millions of Jewish lips murmured three times a day and at the moment of ultimate dread, they were shaken to the core.”12
Eichmann was now a prisoner of the Jews, a race he had vowed to destroy. To his surprise, during the ten days and nights that he was in Mossad’s custody in Argentina, he was neither molested nor insulted. Nevertheless, he was convinced that his captors would kill him sooner or later. “Every time we gave him something to eat,” recalled one of the agents, “he thought we were about to poison him; if we took him out to walk in the courtyard, he was afraid we would shoot him. We thought we were dealing with a man of particular intellectual qualities. But before us stood a nobody, a coward who cooperated all down the line, who never gave us any problems and sometimes even offered to help us.”13
It seemed that all Eichmann now cared about was his family. It was the one thing about which he showed genuine emotion. He told one of his captors of his worries about his wife and children.
“I didn’t leave them any money,” Eichmann said. “How will my wife and sons live?”
“No harm will come to them,” one of his captors replied. “They’ll manage all right without you. But tell me, please, you who worry so much about your children, how could you and your colleagues murder little children in the tens and hundreds of thousands?”
Eichmann looked upset.
“Today, I can’t understand how we could have done such things,” he confessed. “I was always on the side of the Jews. I was striving to find a satisfactory solution to their problem. I did what everybody else was doing. I was conscripted like everyone else—I wanted to get on in life.”14
On May 19, 1960, Eichmann was disguised as a crewmember of El Al Israel Airlines and taken on board a plane bound for Israel.15 Dressed in airline uniforms, the Mossad agents and their prisoner had managed to get through the Argentine passport control undetected. The agents’ doctor had assured them that Eichmann could be kept drugged in such a way that he could walk and keep his eyes open but not speak. Later that day, the El Al aircraft touched down in Israel.
At 4 p.m. on May 23, 1961, Israel’s prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, stepped up to the rostrum in the Knesset to address the packed chamber. “I have to inform you that a short time ago, Israel’s security forces located one of the biggest Nazi criminals, Adolf Eichmann,” he announced. “He is already in detention in this country and will shortly be brought before court here under the law of 1950 on the punishment of Nazis and their accomplices.”16
There were cries and gasps and then thundering applause.
The following day, fifty-five-year-old Adolf Eichmann found himself standing before Berlin-born police superintendent Avner W. Less, who would lead the criminal investigation into Eichmann’s many crimes. “Suddenly, there stood before me a very ordinary looking man,” recalled Less, “not much taller than me, skinny rather than slim, certainly no Frankenstein monster, nor a devil with cloven hooves and horns.”
For more than 275 hours, Less would question Eichmann in painstaking detail. Before each interrogation, Eichmann would stand to attention, as if he were facing an SS disciplinary hearing. Less was surprised at first by how poor Eichmann’s German was. “Official language is the only language I know,” Eichmann would later admit.
At one point, Less asked Eichmann if he had any regrets.
Eichmann looked at Less in astonishment and said that remorse was “something for little children.”17
Eichmann’s trial began after eight months of investigation.
Criminal case 40/61 opened on April 11, 1961, with Eichmann sitting in a bulletproof glass box, wearing spectacles and showing no obvious emotion as Moshe Landau, president of the court, read out charges in Hebrew against him. Simon Wiesenthal was one of many onlookers who were surprised by Eichmann’s appearance: “Everything about Eich
mann seemed drawn with charcoal: his grayish face, his balding head, his clothes. There was nothing demonic about him, he looked like a book-keeper who is afraid to ask for a raise.”18
The journalist and academic Hannah Arendt, who was covering the trial for the New Yorker, famously noted that: “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.” Eichmann had personified the “banality of evil.”19
For those in the courtroom who had survived his genocide, by contrast, nothing was normal about the man whose crimes they heard catalogued for the first time. To them and those still alive today who were saved by Wallenberg, Eichmann was the very incarnation of evil, and Arendt’s assessment could not have been more profoundly wrong.
Central to the prosecution’s case were Eichmann’s actions in Hungary, which had proved that far from being a cog in a machine and a bureaucrat who had just been “taking orders,” he had disobeyed Himmler’s instructions and tried to kill Hungary’s last Jews until he was forced to flee Budapest before the Soviet advance.20 Told to stop his genocide, Eichmann did the opposite. Witnesses from Hungary such as Joel Brand, whom Eichmann had sent on a fruitless and tragic mission—a cruel distraction as it turned out—were able to face their former tormentor and testify to his crimes in Budapest. The “blood for trucks” deal and his experiences in Budapest and then British custody would, Brand concluded, “haunt [him] until [his] dying day. It is much more than a man can bear.”21
The judges at the trial finally decided that Eichmann was a Jew-hating Nazi fanatic whose “hatred was cold and calculating, aimed rather against the Jewish people as a whole, than against the individual Jew, and for this very reason, it was so poisonous and destructive in all its manifestations.” Rather than confess and atone for his crimes in public, Eichmann had lied repeatedly during cross-examination in a vain attempt to escape conviction. “[This] attempt was not unskillful, due to those qualities which he had shown at the time of his actions—an alert mind; the ability to adapt himself to any situation; cunning and a glib tongue.”22
At one point during the trial, Attorney General Gideon Hausner had spoken of Eichmann’s greatest adversary, Raoul Wallenberg, by now missing for more than a quarter century. “One bold man,” said Hausner, “who had the strength to act according to his conscience and belief. His deeds, like those of King Christian of Denmark, give rise to the somber thought: How many could have been saved, even in the countries of actual extermination, had there only been more like him among those who had the power to act, whether openly or in secret?”23
IT WAS 8:21 A.M. ON Friday, December 11, 1961, when the “Master” finally got his comeuppance.
Judge Moshe Landau pronounced the trial’s verdict in Hebrew: “Beit din she dan otcha limita. [The court condemns you to death.]”
Eichmann stood with his back straight, poker faced, in his bulletproof box.
“You will be hanged by the neck until death ensues,” declared Landau.
Eichmann—the “enemy of the human species”—had been found guilty on all fifteen counts.24
In a handwritten letter, Eichmann had already appealed to President Ben Zwi of Israel for clemency. But Zwi had publicly stated that “There can be no pardon for what this man has done.”25
Israeli authorities were meanwhile flooded with letters from around the globe. Volunteers asked to be allowed to hang Eichmann. Many people suggested that Eichmann be killed in a gas chamber. Others recommended a far more prolonged, painful, and public end for the man who had protested throughout the trial that he was “not the monster I am made out to be.”26
At 11:30 p.m. on May 31, 1962, a Protestant clergyman entered the condemned’s cell.
“I am not prepared to discuss the Bible,” snapped Eichmann. “I do not have time to waste.”
While awaiting the verdict, Eichmann had earlier told the same clergyman, Reverend William Hull, “My brother is a lawyer at Linz . . . he wrote me that on the evidence submitted there was only one verdict possible, and that I should be set free.”27
At ten minutes to midnight, guards led Eichmann to the execution chamber, where he was stood on a trapdoor. A noose hung from a beam above him.
The noose was about to be placed around Eichmann’s neck when he suddenly spoke to the small group of witnesses before him.
“After a short while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again. So is the fate of all men.”
Eichmann looked down. He seemed to be struggling to control his emotions.
“I have lived believing in God and I die believing in God.”
There was another pause.
“Long live Germany. Long live Argentina. Long live Austria. These are the countries with which I have been most closely associated, and I shall not forget them. I greet my wife, my family, and my friends. I had to obey the rules of war and my flag.”
The noose was placed over Eichmann’s head.
One of the guards present, Shalom Nagar, recalled that he was standing a few feet from Eichmann, who refused to have his face covered and was still wearing a pair of checkered slippers.
Nagar pulled the lever on the gallows and Eichmann fell, dangling by the rope. His face was soon as white as chalk, his eyes bulging and his tongue dangling.
An hour later, Nagar and a colleague removed Eichmann from the gallows. “The rope rubbed the skin off his neck,” recalled Nagar, “and his tongue and chest were covered with blood. I didn’t know that when a person is strangled all the air remains in his stomach. So when I lifted him, all the air that was inside came out and the most horrifying sound was released from his mouth—‘baaaaa’—I felt [that] the Angel of Death had come to take me too.”
With the help of other guards, Nagar placed Eichmann’s corpse on a stretcher and carried him to an oven. A fellow guard, who had survived Auschwitz, had ensured that the oven was working at the optimum temperature. Nagar pushed the stretcher toward the oven, but he was shaking so hard with nerves that Eichmann’s corpse rolled from side to side. Finally, he was able to push the “architect of the Final Solution” inside the oven and close its doors.
Shalom Nagar was supposed to accompany the ashes to the port of Tel Aviv, but he was so affected by the experience that his boss had to send him home.
Eichmann’s ashes were dumped in the Mediterranean. They would not poison Israeli soil.
Forty years later, Nagar told an Israeli journalist: “God commands us to wipe out Amalek [the enemy of the Jew], and ‘not to forget.’ I have fulfilled both.”28
VERA HERMAN, like many of those rescued by Wallenberg, followed the Eichmann trial with intense interest. “There was so much pain that nothing could make up for it,” she recalls, “but if anything came close, that was it—Eichmann’s trial. It was a book ending for me. I was happy that he was executed, but it wasn’t enough. You can only die one death and he should have died a million times.”29
Erwin Koranyi also followed the trial from Montreal, where it made daily headlines. He realized now how common men like Eichmann had been in German society under the Nazis. Indeed, Eichmann had been but one of many who had belonged to the Hitler cult. “Hitler’s genius was to understand that there is a balance between aggression and love. Hitler somehow instinctively grasped that if you fuel the aggression, then you automatically increase the love and dedication to the cause. Somebody must be hated terribly to do that.”30
20
The Wallenberg Mystery
IN STOCKHOLM in the months after the war ended, Raoul Wallenberg’s parents waited anxiously for the day when the Soviets would send their son home. They celebrated his thirty-fourth birthday in August 1945 and paid a tax bill for him that October.1 But the weeks became months, and then two years, and still Raoul did not return. In 1947, Raoul’s increasingly desperate mother appealed to Stalin directly:To Generalissimo Joseph Stalin:
As mother of Raoul Wallenberg, legation secr
etary to the Swedish mission in Budapest, I plead with the powerful rulers of the Soviet Union for help in retrieving my beloved son. In short, my son’s story is as follows: From July 1944 to January 1945, he fought with all his might and intelligence against the Nazi terror, which wanted to destroy the entire Jewish population of Budapest. When Budapest was liberated by the forces of the Soviet Union, my son was put under protection of the Russian military authorities in January 1945. This fact was officially communicated to the Swedish Foreign Office by the Foreign Ministry of the Soviet Union in January 1945. In February that year, this joyful message was further confirmed to me by Ambassador Kollontay. Since then, two and a half years have passed without the Soviet authorities communicating any further information about him. My trust in the powerful Soviet Union is so great that, despite my anxiety, I have remained convinced that I would see him again. As I presume that the delay with his return home is due to misunderstandings by lower-level officials, I now turn to the ruler of the Soviet Union with a prayer that my son may be returned to Sweden and to his longing mother.
Respectfully,
Maj von Dardel2
Maj von Dardel gave the letter to the Swedish Foreign Ministry in Stockholm and asked them to pass it on to Moscow. But the letter never reached Stalin. An official stated caustically: “If this is just a matter of calming Mrs. Von Dardel, we can always conduct a mass at Minindel [the Russian Foreign Ministry].”3 This dismissive attitude was shared by many Swedish diplomats including Dag Hammarskjold, the Swedish UN secretary general (1953-61), who complained wearily: “I do not want to begin World War Three because of one missing person.”4
It was not until August 18, 1947, that Andrei Vyshinsky, the Soviet deputy foreign minister, made the first official Soviet statement about Wallenberg: “Wallenberg is not in the Soviet Union and he is not known to us.” Refusing to believe Vyshinsky, Raoul’s parents founded Wallenberg Action, an international pressure group whose mission was to try to find their son. Maj told her daughter, Nina, and son, Guy, to assume that Raoul was alive until the end of the century and not to give up hope.
